i whored for art…

Post Format Archives: Galleries

Last night, buoyed with a tub of vanilla ice cream and post-ride fuzzies, I finally got around to watching the last, movie-length episode of the gloriously weird Sense8. Yes, I cried.

I stuck around for the credits, and post all of that deep emotion, saw the logo for Venus Castina Productions, the company of Lana Wachowski and her wife, Karin Winslow, and thought, “I know that arse. I’d recognise that arse anywhere. I saw that arse in the Louvre.” I didn’t photograph her from that side though, but she was on my ticket when I visited, and I spent a long time with her, five hours into my nine-hours of getting done by the Louvre. Hermaphrodite endormi, 2nd century Rome with the bedding done in the 17th century when the fashion was to go all Baroque on Classic sculpture.

Continuing art goals. 113.5km of the Berliner Mauerweg from Zehlendorf to Kreuzberg the long way around. One pinch flat on the way. Interesting variety of psychosomatic complaints that each went away when they realised I wasn’t stopping. Sometime around Invalidensiedlung I too realised I wasn’t stopping and went way past my usual ‘long ride’ distance (cyclocross does not prepare me for long days of arse pounding). Beautiful countryside, cheerful Germans everywhere, some cobbles, some truly shameful city ‘bike paths’ that were worse than the cobbles, decided that riding the route counter-clockwise, and finding alternate side-streets through some of the industrial mess of Schönholz (it isn’t) and Wilhelmsruh (also isn’t) is the way to get it done. Sometime in the coming weeks maybe. I’m not sure I have the capacity to get through 50 more kilometres yet. Unknown territory and all.

Over the last month (yes, that month), I decided I need more goals. Art goals. So I put down hypothetical / future works I’d like to make onto my other website, and went for another ride. The last month’s riding, being when I couldn’t hammer myself and had to practice restraint, turned out to be rather bloody good for me. So, sitting around thinking about how I could ever turn me doing Paris–Roubaix into An Art, and people mouthing off about how it takes ‘hard work’ to get what you want — nah fam, it doesn’t work like that, that’s the lie of meritocracy — I thought, fuck ya’s all, you want hard? See me. And thought a good preparation would be to cycle the 167 or so kilometres of the former Berlin Wall. Some of which I’ve already done, so I know it’s got cobbles and all, and is a madness in that department.

167 kilometres is also a pretty good single day race, and going from roads to cobbles to gravel, through the city, around Brandenburg, fields and lakes and forests, it’d make a banger of a women’s Spring Classic, Germany’s own Strada Bianche. Just saying, UCI.

Under-slept, with pockets full of energy bars, I decided to reconnoitre the southern part of the Berliner Mauerweg, starting from where Kreuzberg turns into Alt-Treptow, just over Lohnmühlenbrücke on the Landwehrkanal, working out how that connects to Johannisthaler Chaussee (which is the part I know up until Waltersdorfer Chaussee), and then all the sketchy bits following the Berlin-Brandenburg boundary until I ended up in the arse of Zehlendorf, a spit away from Größer Wannsee. Then back through Steglitz. Dead weird out there. 80-ish kilometres, a bit under half the full loop, plenty of stops while I looked at my GPS track and worked out if I was going in the right direction. Gloriously beautiful fields blooming with late-spring flowers, farm life everywhere, cheerful southern Berliners everywhere. And cobbles. Oh my, cobbles. I am so, so very far from hard.

Next up is Zehlendorf up to Frohnow, via Spandau, which covers most of the route I don’t know, and gets me used to spending those hours in the saddle, something I don’t have a habit for. Then it’s just another hundred kilometres, a lot more cobbles, and that’s Paris–Roubaix.

It’s International Museum Day in Germany. And I’ve spent much of it in die grüne Hölle, ’cos this weekend it’s 24 Hours Nürburgring. Which is also art. And there’s the ring°werk museum there, so we’re sorted for museums.

But MedievalPOC has been Twitting some of my photographs from 4 ½ years of museum-ing and I’m kinda shocked at how much art I saw and photographed (and the hours I spent in Photoshop prepping, hours spent blogging), and how much I’ve forgotten until I’m reminded again. And embarrassed by my earlier photographs, so many of which I wish I could go back and retake.

Hans Baldung Grien’s Der Dreikönigsaltar was one of the very first works I saw, four years ago on my first visit to Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, and returned to many times. The best photos I took of it was in 2015, in Gemäldegalerie — St Mauritius and Companions, which was for MedievalPOC, and I said, “This is for @mediavalpoc. I look at art far more closely because of them.” I look at the world far more closely because of her.

One last thing: I’ve never photographed the exterior wings of this altarpiece. St Katharina is on one, she who is the patron saint of scholars, spinsters, and knife sharpeners, and who has appeared alongside St Mauritius all the way back to the earliest extant work of him, the sculptures in Dom zu Magdeburg St. Mauritius und Katharina.

A few pieces of European Baroque and Rococo art I saw on my very wrecked, post-season, post-bumpout afternoon in the NGV National Gallery of Victoria. Saw out of chronology, ’cos I saw this stuff before the Mediæval art.

Dispensing with my whinging first, the NGV is one of those difficult museums to photograph in, heaps of light bouncing of old glaze, plates of glass between artwork and mob, all the usual. The works I ended up blogging are the ones I could both photograph reasonably easily and scrubbed up ok in Photoshop.

Art I’m surprised got out of Europe: Giambattista Tiepolo’s The Finding of Moses and The Banquet of Cleopatra. Mattia Preti’s Sophonisba receiving the poison. Especially when there were tiny, not very good Canalettos and tiny, not very good Rubens. I’m spoilt for both of them, pretty much every large-ish museum in north-west Europe has a few Canalettos, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin alone has a quartet of huge ones, and Rubens, after the surprise of Musée des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes I’m a snob. Rounding out the stash was Derby Porcelain’s The Four Continents.

As usual, a lot of what I photographed was with Medieval POC in mind, and not having much time or energy meant I’m really not representing the NGV so well. It’s not Louvre-sized, probably more like Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België in Brussels. There’s a lot more there than old European art, just that’s it’s also a strange place, and trying to make sense of how Australia sees itself in relation to Europe — not just England or historically to the British Empire, but Europe as a single entity wherein ‘Europe’ in fact denotes the western half only, and how Australia uses the art from that peninsula-continent to create a historical identity for itself … Australia has little to nothing in common with this. It’s part of Asia-Pacific, South-East Asia, Pasifika; it’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land. The idea of the museum, imported from Europe as it was, doesn’t seem capable of acknowledging that.

A few more pieces of art from Naarm / Melbourne’s NGV National Gallery of Victoria, which I saw on my very wrecked, post-season, post-bumpout afternoon at the end of March. I wasn’t photographing much by this point, mainly grabbing a few I thought Medieval POC would get a kick out of, and very much not trying to document the museum itself. Bits and pieces. And Anguish. I thought of Onyx when I saw that. “Why? Because I’m raked over and bleeding out?” “Nah, ’cos you’re a murder of black crows about to feast on some dainty white lamb flesh.” Or something like that. We’re supposed to identify with the sheep. Fuck that.

NGV National Gallery of Victoria, 19th & 20th Century Art — 1: John Rogers Herbert: Moses bringing down the Tables of the Law. 1872–77, England

NGV National Gallery of Victoria, 19th & 20th Century Art — 2: John Rogers Herbert: Moses bringing down the Tables of the Law. 1872–77, England (detail)

A few pieces of European mediæval art I saw on my very wrecked, post-season, post-bumpout afternoon in the NGV National Gallery of Victoria. Considering how long I lived in Naarm / Melbourne, and considering I spent five years across the road at Victorian College of the Arts, I’m pretty sure I went inside a total of maybe once, and that for a special exhibition which I can’t remember — the permanent collection and the building itself I never wandered through. Mainly ’cos I wasn’t into museums then.

So, mediæval European stuff, ’cos I am into it. Weird to go to Australia to see bits and pieces of back home. I was looking for Saint Mauritius (of course), because somehow I got it in my head they have a rather nice painting of him. Didn’t find it. Might not be on display. Didn’t find it on their website either, but that’s a horror to search so … Did find exactly one Biblical Magi / Heilige Drei Könige / Aanbidding der Wijzen (it’s from Antwerpen, let’s go with that last one), very buried in the bottom right corner of a retable, which I shone my phone light on to get some illumination to photograph (then butchered it in Photoshop — is not my best work).

The first room, with the wooden sculptures reminded me of Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu (still one of the best mediæval collections and museums I’ve seen), but the dissonance of German next to Spanish next to Italian next to Flemish made for an odd journey. A small collection, lack of space, prioritising newer art and temporary exhibitions can justify the jumble somewhat, yet it proposes a strange, fantastical idea of the history of Europe, a Europe that is monolithic, singular, consistent. Yeah, I’m spoilt here. I can go to small cities like Magdeburg and see a thousand years of history from just that region of central, northern, Germanic Europe all in the original church, and the depth and detail imparted shapes a massively different reality for Europe’s history.

But still, they have a Hans Memling, some Dürer etchings, and a pile of other works that are pretty solid examples of what was going on in Western Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. The German pieces are solid and heavy and dark; the French all flowing in International Gothic style; the Italian ramping up for the Renaissance. Most of the pieces aren’t brilliant, though pretty much all are solid pieces by renowned artists, and nothing is of the poor, regional copies that litter museums over here. And occasionally there’s a work I’m frankly surprised got out of Europe, which speaks of the kind of money backing the NGV.

Mixing the NGV’s Triennial and its own collection together as I was decidedly zombie on the day (Paea saw me and laughed), and sometimes not sure where one or the other began or stopped, and saving all the old cruft for a separate post.

Richard Mosse I confused with Trevor Paglen, whose Limit Telephotography and The Black Sites work has been turning up in my reading for over a decade. Mosse is kind of a successor, or working similarly, pushing photographic technology and making deeply political art. Louisa Bufardeci also, though using manual labour to again create something on first view beautiful and aesthetic, which is contextualised into a evidence of and memorial for refugees whose boats sunk at sea off the coast of Australia. Both these works sit uneasily inside Fortress Australia and within the NGV, as Mosse’s second work (which you have to pass through to reach Incoming) describes: the NGV’s former use of Wilson’s security, to whom the government outsourced illegal detention centre policing. (The NGV ended its contract with Wilson’s after artists’ protests, organised by Gabrielle de Vietri and others, though the relationship between arts institutions like the NGV, policing and generations of human rights violations remains largely untouched.)

Onto something slightly more cheerful, or at least I could not wipe the smile off my face watching Adel Abidin’sCover Up! where Marilyn Monroe’s iconic subway scene in The Seven Year Itch is replaced by an Arab man wearing a Kandura (Dishdasha, Thawb) giving me the cheekiest eye as he tries (not very hard) to prevent a flash of leg.

Next to that is Faig Ahmed, with a 21st century Azerbaijani carpet, digitally bleeding and glitching. Hal reminds me of the Afghan War Rugs, cultural memory lossy compression like a jpg, copied and recopied with no line of context to an original, regional signifiers and techniques that say authentic and traditional unfolded as repeating geometric shapes of aircraft carriers, World Trade Centre towers, text like USA and Pepsi, blocks of iconography decoupled from meaning, becoming pattern again.

Timo Nasseri, Epistrophy, op-art cut into the wall like the mid-20th century works of Adolf Luther I saw in Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal. Possibly a new profile photo coming out of that, but not thinking much of it until I looked at more of his work and saw the thread of Islamic / Islamicate architecture and mathematics in it. Good choice for a profile photo, then.

Jumping to the last artist, Nusra Latif Qureshi. She used to come into the VCA Student Union when we were both students. I always loved her art, miniatures in the South Asian tradition (which has connections to mediæval European illuminations, art flowing along the lines of trade as much as trade and commerce), and I was really happy to see her work in the NGV. Again, political, the colonial history of Europe in the unbroken history of Asia-Pacific.

I had thoughts, weaving through the Triennial and the NGV’s permanent collection in my spent, post-festival state. Thoughts. Many. I had. Like, the art that can touch me is always political, because art is inseparable from political, unless the artist has the luxury to be insulated from having political’s gaze turn onto them, so they get to play with ideas and technology and pretend there are no consequences, no urgency, no struggle; they get to live without the violence of history. I see myself in art that is political, even though it is seldom specifically ‘about’ me. I see also a difference between the superficially political, diversity as aesthetic, and art by artists whose lives, by their very existence, is political. I saw the strength of the NGV when it celebrates, represents, amplifies Asia-Pacific and Indigenous artists. This is when it makes sense, not when it assembles an incoherent, contextless junk box of ‘European’ art, manufacturing a phantasmic history of Australia, like Australia was ever located just off the coast of England, or when it divides that into Art and anything pre-Invasion Asia-Pacific into Ethnography. I didn’t see the entirety of the Triennial or the NGV, it’s an awkwardly designed interior space, easy to miss cul-de-sac turn-offs that open to entire wings, more time walking to and from and between than through art. It struggles between competing imperatives, like that of its European fantasy, or oddly misplaced exhibitions that owe more to consular trade and advertising than art and artists. But, see the Triennial? Yes, if you’re in Naarm. There’s good stuff there (heaps I didn’t see, let alone photograph).

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Currently in: Berlin

supernaut is Frances d’Ath. She has blogged here since 2004. You can find her performances and choreography at francesdath.info. Her design work is at francesdath.name. Frances would like to remind you that I am not my blog (though she likes WordPress very much).